Numerous systems have been developed to automate financial record keeping for the purpose of tracking expense related items, income, assets, and/or liabilities, for budgetary or tax purposes. Nevertheless, although attractive in theory, most conventional systems are impractical for effective use. In most cases, one cannot afford to hire a bookkeeper to gather the necessary data, and even though a number of commercial accounting programs are available which can be run by an individual with no special training on a personal home computer, most individuals do not have the time or desire to run such programs, which inevitably require the individual to manually enter the necessary data into the computer each time a transaction, i.e., the writing of a check or deposit slip, is carried out, or to scan prerecorded forms, which must be specially prepared and compared with the original checks or deposit slips to ensure accuracy.
Numerous entities have finances which would benefit from automation, especially for budget planning or tax purposes, but the automation is useless if it requires generation of additional forms, manual verification and/or manual data entry. The simplest investments, such as a rental property or the purchase of ordinary common stocks, can generate an overwhelming amount of transaction data. Nevertheless, even the most user-friendly home accounting and tax preparation programs tend to end up on the shelf when the user discovers the effort needed to enter transaction data every time a cancelled check is returned or a deposit is made. Even where the bank makes available electronic or optically scannable records which can be entered in the home accounting program, the time necessary to verify the data often negates the time saved by automated entry. Despite the best of intentions, the cancelled checks and other documents concerning the transaction thus often end up in a “shoe box” until they are needed, for example, for taxes, or for an unforeseen crisis such as a divorce or bankruptcy, by which time the individual's records can at best be only partially reconstructed and at great difficulty. While such a possibility should motivate individuals to keep better records, especially in view of the currently available technology for that purpose, it simply does not.